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Zimbler, Jarad

Abstract

What part does context play in the making of literary works and their meanings? What, precisely, do literary scholars
mean when they speak of context? These two fundamental questions are at the heart of Literary Communities and
Literary Worlds (LCLW), which seeks to answer these questions by addressing the careers of several literary exiles
of the mid-twentieth century: Vladimir Nabokov, Stefan Heym, Richard Wright, and Peter Abrahams. Each of these
authors was forced to move abroad mid-career, at a time of global conflict and intense migration not dissimilar to
our own. Moreover, each sought to gain entry to a new literary culture. It is by studying their strategies of entry and
integration that we are able to reveal the special importance of literary context, and, indeed, literary community in
the shaping of works; and it is by focusing on border-crossing and belonging that we are able to advance current
conceptions of the literary world, and, indeed, world literature, and thereby respond to the trans-national turn across
the humanities, which has tended to stress dislocation and displacement over location and embeddedness. LCLW will
ask: How are literary communities constituted? What are the conditions of entry, departure and belonging? And how
important is literary practice, rather than physical presence, in determining membership? Its method is innovative in
combining formal analysis with book history and the sociology of literature. It builds on the ER’s previous research
experience, especially his work on the ‘literary field’, and will be greatly augmented through the supervision of
Professor Nicholas Brown at the University of Illinois-Chicago, a leading expert in theorising the field; and of Dr
Danielle Fuller at the University of Birmingham, , whose own work has advanced understandings of twentieth-century
book history and communities of readership. A secondment at the George Padmore Institute will give the project an
inter-sectoral dimension.